The Circulation of Blood and Care: Value and Kidney Disease Amongst Yolŋu in Northern Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In health care and care scholarship, care is often cast as a gift that exploits caregivers, or generates social debts and inequalities among people who require it. I broaden understandings of how care acquires and distributes value through ethnographic engagement with Yolŋu (an Australian First Nations people) with lived experience of kidney disease. I expand Baldassar and Merla’s concept of the circulation of care to argue that value, like blood, circulates through caregiving practices of generalized reciprocity without transferring worth between caregivers and receivers. Here, the gift of care is neither agonistic or purely altruistic, entangling individual and collective value.